Alan Roe

Alan Roe has worked for more than 45 years as an academic economist and as a policy adviser. He has degrees from the Universities of Leeds, Wales and Cambridge. Early in his career he was a research economist at the University of Wales, the University of Dar-es-Salaam and then the University of Cambridge (Economic Growth Project) and later a Visiting Professor of Economics at Washington University in the USA. He then taught economics for many years at the University of Warwick where he was also for a period the Chairman of Department. In 1994 he was appointed Principal Economist at the World Bank where he worked for 7 years to design and implement large reform projects in the economies of the Former Soviet Union.

After retiring from the Bank in 2000, he returned part-time to Warwick but also joined Oxford Policy Management (OPM) as Principal Economist and a Board Director. In this capacity he helped to initiate OPM’s involvement in both financial sector reform and development and in natural resources issues. Now retired from both the University and OPM he continues as an Associate at both institutions and is also Senior Non-Resident Research Fellow at the UN World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER). In his time at OPM, he was among other things the lead author of the Mining Partnership for Development Toolkit now employed by the International Council of Mining and Metals (ICMM) and their corporate members for analysing the economic and social impacts of large mining projects in low and middle-income economies. Ten country case studies utilising this Toolkit have now been completed – the latest in Brazil and Zambia. He has written extensively in both books, academic journals and for other outlets. Recent publications include Mining in Tanzania –What future can we expect? 2009; the 2nd edition of Fiscal Policy for Development: Poverty, Reconstruction and Growth’, in association with Tony Addison at UN-WIDER, and Enhancing mining’s contribution to the Zambian economy and society, ICMM, April 2014. He advised the British Gas Group (BGG) on their large natural gas project in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Tanzania. Most recently he has jointly edited a multi-author book on Extractive Industries and Less Developed Countries that will be published by Oxford University Press in 2018.